In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).

Yesterday's suffragists and today's female activists who call for more women to be elected to parliament share some ideological grounds: They believe that women exercising the rights of citizenship, whether by voting or by being elected to office, can make a difference in politics. This reasoning was fed by the notion of critical mass, introduced in the political debates in 1988 by Drude Dahlerup. Elevated to lawlike status (or should I say dogma?), the concept of critical mass was quickly made the object of abusive interpretations, becoming synonymous with a relationship of cause and effect between presence and ideas (or between representation and responsiveness), and thus leading one to believe in the existence of a sisterhood among political women and a dialogue on their representational activities. Taking a leaf from the politicians' book, political scientists lost all prudence, abandoning themselves to blind generalizations with the powers that frame female politicians' words and acts. One of these forces is the electoral system. Although it plays a very important role in women's access to parliament, it was completely ignored by those who believe that in greater number, women will change politics.

A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a “women and politics” approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men, gender analysis must incorporate analysis of race, class, sexuality, and other axes of disadvantage, and explore interactions among them. These axes are defined differently in different national contexts, and so examining variation across national borders illuminates the variety of social arrangements that are consistent with human biology: This type of analysis thereby denaturalizes and politicizes gender, racial/ethnic, and class relations (among others). The wide variety of modes and degrees of resistance to these forms of social organization, and success in challenging them, illuminate and inspire new strategies of resistance for people in other countries.

In the previous issue, scholars Jane Mansbridge, Mark P. Jones, and Miki Caul Kittilson addressed a series of questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? In this issue, three additional scholars weigh in. Lisa Baldez considers the pros and cons of gender quota laws on the basis of research she has done on the adoption and implementation of a gender quota law in Mexico. Mona Lena Krook maintains that the adoption of gender quota laws often reveals the deep-rooted nature of gender discrimination in existing processes of candidate recruitment. Finally, Medha Nanivadekar reflects on the lessons that can be drawn about gender quota laws from the example of the reserved seats for women in India, a measure that “created 1 million slots for women.”

One of my most painful memories as a newly minted assistant professor was of giving a talk at a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meeting on democratization in Africa, during which senior Africanist political scientists (Americans) continued their private discussions while I tried to deliver a paper on women and democratization in Africa. My voice carried weakly over the din. I was too intent on getting through my prepared talk in the allotted time to do what I should have done, which was to stop until I got their full attention. I remember thinking at the time that I had something very important to say that they needed to hear, and they were missing this opportunity. That was 1994.

The theory of a “critical mass” seems to live a life of its own, in spite of reservations expressed by researchers, my own reservations included. In debates about women's political representation, the importance of a certain number or percentage of women in political assemblies is often stressed. According to conventional wisdom, research has shown that it takes a certain minimum representation, for example, 30%, before the minority, here women, are able to make a substantial difference in politics.

What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?

Words and phrases commonly used to describe the women's vote in 2004 ranged from “much-coveted,” “vital,” “swing,” “heavily sought after,” and “diverse” to “the largest and most pivotal voting group” and “a challenge for each candidate to reach.” Political strategists, analysts, and scholars were cognizant that women had decided every presidential election since 1980.

Gender quotas have become an increasingly prominent solution in recent years to the underrepresentation of women in electoral politics. As research on these policies has grown, scholars have primarily sought to explain how and why quotas are adopted and, more recently, why some quota policies are more effective than others in facilitating women's access to political office. Most studies, however, also consider—often in a less systematic fashion—the normative aspects of quota reform, usually by detailing the various objections leveled against gender quotas and their impact on efforts to adopt and implement quota measures. Integrating insights from a wide range of case studies, I outline these arguments but note that quotas also generate a host of positive implications that remain largely undertheorized in this literature. I observe, further, that more and more countries are adopting gender quotas despite these well-versed normative objections. These developments indicate greater scope for political initiatives to increase women's representation—despite assumed social and economic “prerequisites” for change—and, indeed, signal a broader shift in international norms in support of projects to promote gender-balanced decision making. One of the few countries seemingly unaffected by these global trends is the United States, where proposals for gender quotas have simply not entered into the realm of public debate. After offering several possible explanations for this state of affairs, I draw on this case to emphasize the pivotal role of politics in opening and closing opportunities to pursue gender quotas, as well as to point to a new set of questions for future research.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2004. 203 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting—nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: “Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles…. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation” (p. 4).

Today's historic level of women in national parliaments—while still far short of parity at 16%—owes much to the global spread of gender quotas. This process, in turn, owes much to the concept of “critical mass”: International organizations, transnational networks, party politicians, women's activists, and even ordinary citizens argue that women should constitute 30% of all political bodies, the magic number where female legislators are said to be able to make a difference. As the notion of critical mass has gained wide currency in the real world, however, many scholars have come to question its utility and relevance for analyzing women's legislative behavior. Indeed, as the number of studies grows, it is increasingly obvious that there is neither a single nor a universal relationship between the percentage of women elected to political office and the passage of legislation beneficial to women as a group: In some cases, women are able to work more effectively together as their numbers grow, but in others, women appear to make a difference—in fact, sometimes a greater difference—when they form a small minority of legislators, either because their increased numbers provoke a backlash among male legislators or because their increased numbers allow individual women to pursue other policy goals. These contradictions thus raise the question: Should feminists give up on critical mass? Or are there any compelling reasons—either theoretical or practical—for retaining the concept in debates on women's political representation?

The “social eligibility pool” stands as one of the most common, and most powerful, explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective office. By this view, women are underrepresented in elite politics because sex discrimination and socialization have produced a gender imbalance in the occupations that typically precede a political career (Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994). The scarcity of women in law and business has implications for politics: “The absence of women from these stepping-stones to political office does explain a good portion of women's under-representation in public office. A decrease in this under-representation helps explain gains in women holding office” (1994, 179).

Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. Edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2005. 310 pp. $24.94.

The transnational dimensions of women's rights are an important emerging area of analysis. Just Advocacy? provides timely and critical insights into this area of study. This edited book is unique in that it applies a cultural lens to the study of political questions relating to rights, transnationalism, and representation, questions which are conventionally conceived through legal, institutional, or social movement theories. The critical feminist stance of the authors draws out the complex and often contradictory nature of human rights—especially as they relate to the operation of gender and to women's lives—and conceives of both feminism and transnationalism in diverse ways.

Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. By Hannah E. Britton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. 198 pp. $35.00.

The women's movement in America tried but failed to have this language added to the U.S. Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

The most important feature of a quota system is that it ensures representation of the target group in a much more definitive manner than does any other method. Quotas are a form of compensation for historical injustice suffered by identifiable groups and represent evidence of society's commitment to redress that injustice. Quotas offer greater legitimacy to a political system by ensuring greater representation and by integrating marginalized groups into the mainstream. Utilitarian justifications of quotas focus on the advantages of greater representation of all sections of society as a means of facilitating their contribution to the society. Quotas indicate that underrepresentation of marginal groups is not a statement of the groups' poor performance but of the system's poor performance at creating a level playing field.

Prior to the recent reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I was involved in numerous conversations regarding strategies for its renewal. These conversations prompted me to reflect not only on the impact of the Voting Rights Act for African-American citizenship but in particular on the ways in which it did for African-American women what the Constitution and its amendments had previously failed to do. After all, it is not until the passage of this legislation that African-American women are first extended a modicum of citizenship in the United States.

Women and Politics in Chile. By Susan Franceschet. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2005. 203 pp. $49.95.

This is a well-researched, well-written, and conceptually precise contribution to a thick field of books on the topic of women and politics in Chile. Susan Franceschet frames her book as an analysis of gendered citizenship in Chile from the 1930s to the present. In the individual chapters, she employs concepts and theories drawn from literature on social movements and women and the state. Specifically, she addresses four main areas of debate in the field of women and politics: the employment of a “politics of difference” as a movement frame, the tensions between “autonomous” or “double militant” activist positions, the factors that impede or facilitate women's access to electoral politics, and relations between women and women's state machineries.

Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. By Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 241 pp. $70.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Fortunately, in the last 20 years, the scholarship on women in politics has grown considerably, as have the number of women running for office, the number of women holding office, and thus the amount of data, artifacts, contexts, and situations to be analyzed. Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler, in Governing Codes, offer a solid, interesting, and insightful addition to this growing line of work. With the presentation of four intriguing case studies, the authors provide a rich and informative analysis from a revealing vantage point—the use of metaphor—to uncover what remains the frustrating and challenging language that four credible and politically astute women had to overcome, as well as some of the rhetorical strategies they successfully employed in doing so.

Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping. Edited by Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart. Lanham, MD, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 304 pp. $75.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

Framed in the language of peace (making, keeping, building), the United Nations military interventions of the 1990s have spawned feminist demands for participation, together with critiques of the sexist and gendered practices that have characterized these missions. In Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, 14 scholar-practitioners relay their observations of the way in which gender politics pervades UN peace missions and postconflict reconstruction.

Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2004. 225 pp. $49.95.

Armed conflict, torture, murder, sexual assault, sexual enslavement, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS—United Nations peacekeepers are sent into conflict-torn countries to help prevent the further spread of these horrors. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often highlights these brutalities when he publicly calls upon member states to send troops and resources to protect and assist vulnerable populations in conflict zones. In her most recent book, Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping, Sandra Whitworth provides a critical feminist analysis of a UN peacekeeping system that not only is failing to protect civilian populations but is also implicated in the spread of HIV/AIDS and in the torture, murder, sexual assault and enslavement, and human trafficking of the very populations the mission was purportedly sent to assist. Throughout, Whitworth uses sharp critical feminist analyses to help us understand why UN peacekeeping missions have too often become sites of violence and abuse.